Coercion

by Tim Tigner

  NOVOSIBIRSK, SIBERIA

  Karpov was experiencing déjà vu. He had been sitting in his apartment pondering his precarious relationship with Anna, when once again a knock on the door disturbed his thoughts. Once again it was Major Maximov bearing unexpected news.

  Karpov still blamed the major, unfairly he knew, for throwing him off his game with Anna the night of their big date. He had managed to keep her on the line even without revealing the secret of her brother’s death, but on the line was not in the boat. That vexed him.

  Looking his aide in the eye, Karpov sensed something unusual. Something good. As always the major’s uniform was immaculately pressed, and his gray hair was perfectly coiffed, but tonight there was evidence of exuberance beneath his crisp military demeanor.

  “Pardon the intrusion, sir. But I thought you’d want to know right away. Yarik’s alive.”

  “Yarik’s alive,” Karpov repeated. “How is that possible?”

  “Three people parachuted from the plane before it exploded. They found tracks and harnesses.”

  “Is he okay?”

  “They think so. They can’t be sure because they don’t know where he is. The team investigating the crash site found parts of eight bodies, none of which was his. Therefore they’re assuming Yarik was among the three jumpers. One of the jumpers had a problem with his parachute and didn’t survive the fall. We don’t know who he was—the wolves didn’t leave much—but he had hair.”

  “Where do they think Yarik went?”

  “He ran off in pursuit of the other survivor. The details are scant. According to the senior officer at the scene, the few remaining tracks indicated that a heavy jumper set out in pursuit of a lighter one. Judging by the tracks, both men appeared healthy. That’s all they know.”

  “How’s the search and rescue going?”

  “There isn’t one. The trail was already a day old when they got there. The terrain was too rough to follow them in a jeep. What’s more, the location is too remote for helicopters to service it efficiently—there’s no place to refuel. The government is not going to make that much fuss over one man, even a general. Yarik is on his own.”

  “So we just sit tight and wait for him to call?”

  “That’s all we can do.”

  “For how long?”

  “Could be days. There’s nothing out there. But you know Yarik. He’s no doubt enjoying himself.”

  “Yes,” Karpov said. “No doubt.”

  Chapter 38

  SIBERIAN OUTBACK, RUSSIA

  The first gust of the storm front swept in like a big broom from the sky, nearly knocking Alex off his snowshoed feet. This was what Siberia was known for. Alex shifted his gaze from the heavens to his watch. It was two thirty in the afternoon, and dark as dusk.

  He promised himself to keep going for another hour before holing up. He was still feeling good from the smoked fish, and his legs were holding. Minutes later, it became clear that he would not last an hour. Half that would be a stretch. His eyelids were freezing together every time he blinked, and the storm had cut his visibility to near zero. Threatening as the weather was, Alex knew it might be more dangerous to stop. Yarik could be ten meters behind him now, and he wouldn’t know it. Fear was a great motivator, but it could also be blinding.

  Alex had not caught sight of the giant since he had spotted the descending parachute. He had no objective way of knowing that Yarik was still on his tail. But he sensed it. He had been coddling the hope that Yarik had fallen hard on the trap he had spent valuable time preparing. That hope had vanished an hour earlier. Before the wind kicked in, he heard a shot from the direction of the cottage. So much for getting lucky. There was a chance that the hermit was just hunting, or even that he had killed Yarik, mistaking him for the man who stole his supplies. But Alex was far more inclined to believe that if someone was shooting, it would be Yarik. And there had only been one shot. It would take more than that to kill the hulk.

  Alex put the maddening range of possibilities aside and continued to press on. He briefly considered trying to set another trap. In the storm it was getting difficult to see your own feet, much less spot a snare. But he now realized that it would be redundant. The weather was a trap, and both of them were already in it.

  Alex wrapped both his pilfered blanket and the parachute around himself and trudged on. A few steps were all it took him to figure out that this system was not going to work. With his hands thus occupied, he could not move and check his compass at the same time. That was unacceptable. Now that the weather had cut his visibility to an arm’s length, he had to check the compass constantly. He cut a slot in the middle of the blanket and donned it like a poncho. Then he cut eyeholes in the center of the parachute and a slit to breathe through and draped it over his head. He secured the new ensemble at the waist with parachute cord. Alex finished the transformation off by laughing at himself and that gave him strength: he was now a ghost in a snowstorm.

  The new outfit worked for a while, but the whipping wind forced him to stop and adjust it every quarter mile or so, exposing his freezing fingers and further slowing his pace. Where the wind worked its way through, it licked at him like an icy flame and burned his flesh. The outfit was awkward, too. He was wearing a T-shirt, a shirt, two winter coats, a blanket, a fur hat, and a parachute. He worried that any moment Yarik would bump into him, and he would be as helpless to fight back as a kitten in a sack. Still, he pressed on.

  After half an hour, he concluded that Yarik was no longer the most immediate threat to his life. Despite Alex being dressed like the Michelin man, the cold was killing him as surely as any bullet could. There was no way he could live through the night exposed this way. He simply had to find shelter.

  Alex struggled on and on, investigating every dark shadow in hopes of finding a grove of tightly packed trees or a rock formation that would shelter him from the wind. There was little around. Although ice and snow caked his face and choked his view, he was painfully aware that his labored steps were leaving Yarik a trail as plain as a furrow in a field. It was no longer a game of hide-and-seek. It was an endurance test.

  After trudging for a while across a particularly barren stretch of landscape, Alex realized he was out on a frozen lake. Perfect. If the lake were more than a mile across, he would not live to see the other side. He would freeze to death midstride. When the spring thaw came, the ice would melt, and his body would be interred with the fishes. No, no, nothing that romantic would happen, he rambled on, distracting himself from the pain with his ghastly tales. Wolves would feast on his carcass long before the fish got him. Mother Nature was exerting her presence and her power. She seemed determined to put him in his place. The man who had once been Alex Ferris, International Private Investigator, was now just so much red meat, a protein link in the great food chain.

  With that joyous thought, he felt the gradient change. Two steps later he bumped into a low-hanging branch, and fell backward into the snow. He had made it across the lake! And, wait a minute, it wasn’t a branch, it was a railing covered in snow! Alex was standing in front of a cabin, a cabin more glorious than the Taj Mahal.

  He followed the railing until it ended, and then he climbed two steps up onto the porch. He tried the front door without knocking and found it locked. He wanted to ram it with his shoulder, but there was a big bear spike set in the middle to prevent exactly that move.

  Alex looked for a pregnable window, but found them all small and shuttered. Panic began to close in. He shed the ghost suit, retrieved the hermit’s hand ax, and began working at the aged oak surrounding the door’s lock. Time and again he swung vicious blows powered with wild desperation. But the door was made to withstand a bear attack, and the job was maddeningly slow.

  After about fifty whacks, the wood around the latch looked sufficiently splintered. Alex tried kicking the door. It gave a little. He took a couple steps back and aimed a lunging sid
e-kick just below the spike. The wood screamed in protest and then surrendered. Alex crashed into the cabin and onto the hardwood floor. He was saved!

  The wind came in with him, disturbing the thick layer of dust like a tomb raider’s brush. Stale air had never tasted so sweet.

  By the time Alex managed to regain his feet, there was already a mat of snow on the floor. It had rolled in after him like winter’s hungry tongue. Alex had to expend some effort to push the door closed against the blustering fury, but he managed, grateful the latch still found something to cling to. “Feast on the giant if you’re so hungry!”

  Frozen and exhausted, he collapsed right there onto an inviting bearskin rug. For the brief moment he remained conscious, Alex felt himself melting, draining, soaking into the warmth of the fur, and he was happy.

  It seemed only seconds later that the door crashed open in the wind. Was he dreaming? No, the icy gale was very real. It took a strength of will far greater than that required by the earliest Monday-morning alarm for Alex to roll over and get up to close it.

  Halfway to the door, he stopped in his tracks. Something was there. The light was dim, and at first he didn’t understand the sight that met his eyes. Alex found himself hypnotized by the muddle before him, his starved mind slow to engage. He watched with abstracted noncomprehension as Yarik struggled to extract himself from a snow-encrusted cocoon. Apparently, he had cut arm, eye, and leg holes in a brown sleeping bag and then zipped it up around himself.

  As their eyes met, Alex saw that Yarik, too, was surprised. The eye-to-eye contact carried the force of a cattle prod, giving each the electric adrenaline surge necessary to tap into reserves neither knew he possessed. Siberia still wanted her sacrifice.

  Chapter 39

  SIBERIAN OUTBACK, RUSSIA

  Time slowed for Alex as Yarik sloughed off his sleeping bag to rise like a demon from the mire. His adrenal glands were going for broke, heightening his senses, and speeding his thoughts. He could feel the individual chambers of his heart contracting—bu-bum, ba-bump, bu-bum, ba-bump. He could see twitches and tweaks as clearly as signals and flares. But this final confrontation wasn’t going to be about observation. It was going to be about action.

  Alex needed a weapon. Preferably an elephant gun, hand grenade, or howitzer. He scanned the room and spotted the hand ax on the floor to his left, lying where he had dropped it when bursting through the door. He spun down, snatched it up, and continued spinning around, wielding the ax in a wide clockwise arc, a helicopter with one blade. He whipped his head around faster than his body so his eyes could fix on an appropriate target—a head, hand, or throat—and saw Yarik bringing his hand cannon to bear. Alex adjusted the arc, and a split second later the hand ax and the Stechkin flew out the door and into the snow along with Yarik’s forefinger.

  Yarik seemed unfazed by his loss, and dove at Alex. Alex dodged with a diving roll and jumped back to his feet with a couple yards between them. So much for the opening salvos.

  The two veteran combatants faced each other, like a boxer against a wrestler. Alex knew he couldn’t let his opponent get hold of him or it would all be over. He backed away to gain some time to think and saw the giant’s hand go back down to his side. Another gun or a hunting knife? Alex’s heart wavered, but whatever it was that Yarik had reached for was not there. His hand came back empty. Death was demanding a fair fight. Fair?

  They circled each other like contenders in a ring, studying, calculating, anticipating. Alex used his peripheral vision to survey the room, seeking areas of tactical advantage, searching for improvised weapons. A homemade end table drew his eye, with wooden legs the size of baseball bats.

  He lunged for the table, flipping it and kicking off two legs as Yarik jumped atop a dusty couch and yanked a moose rack off the wall. The enormous antlers were joined together without the head in the middle.

  Yarik jumped down off the couch to land squarely on both feet with a thump that rattled the windows. His eyes gleamed with satisfaction as his mouth crinkled to the right with confidence. His weapon was an awkward one, but very deadly. The beast’s rack also provided Yarik with a formidable shield. Alex’s weapons were far less menacing, but they left him more quick and nimble, accenting his only natural advantage.

  With a devilish grin on his face, Yarik began backing Alex into a corner, swinging the rack before him left to right to left like a prickly pendulum. Alex watched as if in third-person, mesmerized by the approaching kaleidoscope of death. Yarik was getting a feel for the new weapon in his hands, and he began to swing it faster and faster until the wind whistled and the points disappeared from view. He moved a small step closer with each deadly swing, swoosh step, swoosh step, swoosh step, obviously savoring the climax of their whirlwind romance. Speak now, or forever rest in peace.

  Alex’s mind raced, then locked on a plan. One shot, do or die. He waited for a swing toward Yarik’s right and then shot forward and crouched down on his own right knee. He used the bat in his left hand to block the rack’s return while channeling all his own momentum through his right arm into that club as it crashed down on the giant’s leading left shin. Even as he heard the crack of snapping fibular bone, Alex felt the searing pain of moose prongs ripping into the back of his skull. Fortunately, he had preprogrammed his moves and continued his planned combination without hesitation or loss of momentum. Ducking his head, Alex dropped the left blocking club and brought that hand down to join with his right on the thick end of the offensive club. Then, still crouching on one knee, he spun his shoulders 180 degrees and brought the thin end of the club up and around to impale the giant’s stomach with the force of a cavalry lance. Alex felt the gust of exhaled breath, heard the sickening mortal squish, and rolled aside to see what happened next.

  Yarik doubled over, blood erupting from his mouth while his eyes bulged like balloons. He toppled forward, fell hard onto the rack, twitched twice, then relaxed. Like a puppet with cut strings, Yarik never made a sound.

  A dozen wounds wept blood onto the hardwood floor. Alex averted his eyes. Regaining his feet, he staggered over to the door and pushed it closed. His head was pounding mercilessly and the room starting to spin.

  Chapter 40

  SIBERIAN OUTBACK, RUSSIA

  With Yarik dead, fire was Alex’s immediate priority. He needed to absorb energy. The hearth and kindling were right there, so he managed to get a healthy blaze going in no time. That done he staggered around the cabin looking for a source of water, but of course there was none. There would be a hand pump outside for use during the warmer months, but nothing for the winter. This was a seasonal place.

  His head wounds were next on the triage list. He found a mirror in the kitchen cupboard, and brought it back in by the fire to survey the damage. He could not see the entire wound on the back of his head, but the portion the mirror exposed was a scary sight. His head and shoulders were covered in blood, and part of his scalp seemed to be hanging there like a hairy red Post-it note. If he did not immediately tend to his injuries, he would likely succumb to them.

  He found a dishrag and bound his scalp as best he could to stanch the bleeding. Then he turned his attention to the grisly task of searching the whale of a corpse that was beached and bleeding in the foyer. Alex was delighted to find some strips of venison in one pocket, as he was craving meat. Then he found what he thought was a frozen fish in another, but recoiled in disgust when he saw what he had pulled from the corpse’s pocket. It was a human hand. What kind of a sick creature had he killed? Did Yarik collect hands the way Indians had collected scalps? A moment later Alex understood, and he looked down on the relic in a very different light. Andrey. Fingerprints.

  He set the hand reverently aside and continued the search. One pocket contained a couple of clips of ammunition. Alex retrieved the bloody pistol from the porch but found that the ax had ruined it. You couldn’t win them all.

  Returning to Yarik’s pockets Alex extra
cted a plastic tube that looked like it would hold a long cigar. It bore a stenciled fourteen-character sequence with “Ferris” written just below. As he read his name, Alex felt a huge weight lift off his shoulders. Now he had his own number. He took a minute to memorize it and then tossed the tube into the fireplace. He started to smile but then winced at the pain this caused. Man, did he have a headache.

  Alex kept searching the dead giant’s pockets. He found a wallet, a plastic bag, foreign and domestic Soviet passports, and a ring with a plastic identity card and three sophisticated metal keys. He pocketed everything. Then, leaving two large snow-packed jars to melt by the fire, he began searching the cabin.

  One of the first treasures he uncovered was a bottle of aspirin. Thank you, God! And then, as if in a personal answer to his other prayer, he found the prize he needed most: a map of the surrounding area. Stored in a box of fishing tackle, it was large in scale and showed little but mountains and lakes. There was a star to the side of one lake, presumably marking his present location. Many of the other lakes had notes penciled in on them, references to the type of fish and the best fishing locations. Alex could not care less about that. Fortunately the map also contained one thing that might save his life: a road.

  At the closest attainable point, the highway to Novosibirsk appeared to be just ten kilometers away. In good conditions on flat land, he could run ten kilometers in forty minutes. But the land wasn’t flat, the conditions were as bad as conditions could get, and he was two steps from death’s door. Alex reckoned it would take him anywhere from two hours to eternity to get there.

  He returned to the fire and inspected his head. The external bleeding had stopped, but internally a hematoma could be growing. Given his depleted condition, if he gave in to his overwhelming desire to sleep before receiving medical attention, he would probably never wake up. That road was his best shot at survival.